The Most Powerful Man in Music Isn’t Afraid of AI

To the AI doomsayers who worry about an impending invasion set on a collision course to gobble up the arts, there’s something almost comforting in Lucian Grainge‘s dismissiveness when presented with such a disaster scenario.

He doesn’t wince, his eyes don’t start glancing elsewhere, and he answers without hesitation. If anything, the most powerful man in music seems almost irritated, as if it’s the only question he’s getting nowadays (it’s probably the one he’s asked the most) and he’s tired of having to once again repeat the same refrain.

“Nothing really scares me,” Grainge, now in his 16th year as chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, says with casual confidence. “I’ve done this before several times already. This is just another transformation. We’re having this conversation because of the power of music. Seen it, done it, got the T-shirt. Nothing we can’t deal with if we fight to protect what human beings create.”

As he makes clear, this isn’t Grainge’s first time staring an existential threat to the music business in the face. Over the course of more than four decades in the industry, he’s taken on the transition from cassettes into the CD era, rampant piracy in the Napster and file-sharing era, and the streaming revolution with Spotify. Usually, Grainge has seen those threats blink first, and he looks at AI no differently. “I’ve spent my entire career backing artists,” Grainge says. “Investing behind them, creating commercial opportunities for them and supporting the growth of a global industry that respects their music, their name and likeness, and their legacies. That mission is more critical now than it’s ever been. Music is not content simply to be exploited by technology. Music is art. It’s the foundation of culture.”

Still, he’s certainly not flippant about the tech, its potential revolutionary uses in music creation and its potential to dilute his artists’ earnings by flooding the market with slop. UMG has been aggressive, carving out AI partnerships with the likes of Spotify, Nvidia and Klay, and suing others like Suno when the company feels they’ve crossed a line. “I love change, I love disruption,” Grainge adds, “and I’m very bullish about it provided it’s compensated and that the tech platforms respect us.”

As Grainge guides the world’s largest music company through yet another era of intense change, The Hollywood Reporter has crowned the prolific executive its inaugural Music Titan recipient.

It’s impossible to overstate the influence Grainge holds over the modern music industry. The CEO oversees an empire that is home to the likes of Taylor Swift, The Beatles, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, The Rolling Stones, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, Elton John and Billie Eilish, among hundreds more.

The company had nine of the 10 most listened to artists in the world last year, according to the IFPI, with a market share of nearly 39 percent, according to Billboard, about 11 percent higher than second-place Sony Music.

Born in London in 1960, Grainge came up in a music family, with his late brother, Nigel, founding the record label Ensign Records. Grainge started in music publishing — his first signing was The Psychedelic Furs. He joined UMG in 1986, steadily working his way up in publishing and A&R before eventually overseeing all of UMG’s international operations.

When Grainge was finally announced as UMG’s next CEO in 2010, taking the reins from Doug Morris, the music industry was in a free fall. Revenue was down significantly, as rampant digital piracy, coupled with the broader digital download era, had cratered album sales, and revival from the streaming era was still a half decade away.

In an unenviable starting point, Grainge put himself on the map with the acquisition of an ailing EMI — the famed U.K. record giant whose labels included Capitol, Blue Note and Decca — for $1.9 billion. It was a risky move that underwent intense regulatory scrutiny at the time, and no one knew how much lower record label valuations could get as profits kept bottoming out.

But Grainge’s gambit paid off, further establishing UMG’s lead as the undisputed powerhouse in the business. Today, EMI would seem comically undervalued, even adjusted for inflation. UMG currently holds a market cap of about $30 billion, and it posted about $3.8 billion in revenue in just the most recent financial quarter, more than double the value of the deal. He’s been rewarded handsomely for his stewardship of the company over the decades, raking in more than $300 million alone after taking the company public back in 2021, making him one of Hollywood’s wealthiest executives.

That hasn’t come without adversity: Early in his career, Grainge’s first wife fell into a coma she never recovered from while giving birth to their son, Elliot, who followed in his father’s musical footsteps and is now the CEO of Atlantic Music Group. In 2020, Grainge was one of the first people in Los Angeles to be hospitalized with COVID-19, an experience he’d later describe as a near-death illness.

On the professional end, he’s thrown and taken as many punches, whether it was facing callouts from Kanye West, waging a war against TikTok, fielding a landmark lawsuit against Drake or most recently working through a takeover bid from Bill Ackman. Still, nothing’s managed to shake Grainge. In a wide-ranging interview, he weighs in on leading UMG through the AI disruption, his son’s tenure at Atlantic and Ackman’s attempted takeover of his company earlier this year.

What are you listening to these days?

I always listen to only two things: The first is the stuff I listened to and loved at the very beginning of my passion for music and early parts of my career. I’m fortunate that I started my career in what I think was a golden age of British music, from ’77 through the ’80s, and I signed some of it. Costello, the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Psychedelic Furs, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Pet Shop Boys, Soft Cell, Human League, Depeche Mode. I’m always listening to that. And I’m always listening to some of the light classics. I play a lot of Pavarotti. I’ve started to play a lot of Mozart.

And the other category is listening mostly to new music, new artists from a professional point of view — either because I’m aware of it because we were involved in signing new artists, or people from around the world put new things in front of me.

You’re still in a spot where you know what you like and have a reputation for good ears. When you’re asked for input, what do you hear when trying to find a hit?

I focus on rhythm, I love melody. Music always changes, but rhythm and melody are timeless. Then you add the benefit of what I call the magnificent lyric, the lyric that connects with people. I remember listening to the Lewis Capaldi song [“Someone You Loved”] years ago, and the lightbulb just went off. It’s the melody, the passion, the performance, and then you listen to the lyrics. It’s no different to me than when I heard Chappell Roan, when I first heard “Espresso” from Sabrina Carpenter, when I listen to a Taylor Swift song.

How long does it take for you to determine if it’s a hit? Is it even a whole song?

If it’s incredibly powerful and energetic — like a punk record, something full of attitude, it could be a hip-hop record, something rhythmically violent — there’s a guttural reaction to that. But if it’s something more about class, quality, beauty, I’m quite a slow listener. It’s always two or three listens, and I listen at various volumes. When I’m finally making that decision for me personally, as an old A&R man, I might take a pair of earbuds and just turn it down. You just hear the top.

There’s one global household name superstar who always tells me, “I don’t know how you can listen to my music literally holding an earbud,” but that’s when I can connect with its quality.

In terms of finding those new superstars, we’re seeing fewer stars break through these days. Many of the biggest new acts are yours — Sabrina, Chappell, now Olivia Dean — but does the lack of breakthroughs concern you?

No, we’re just going through a change and a transformation again. Now, when an artist does break and when it cuts through, there’s so much content and there’s so much history. There’s so much for the fan to enjoy and discover. When we broke artists for the first 30 or 40 years of the business, there was no audiovisual. No one had seen them live. You normally broke an act on the first single or for the first album. Now the entire ecosystem can get music to a consumer.

When you do have that special moment, there’s an enormous amount of history, and the entire experience is deeper and probably richer. After COVID, we’d broken four, five, six artists who we signed before: Gracie Abrams, Chappell Roan, Lola Young. I’ll include Sabrina there, too. There are three or four others we’re doing the same with now. To a lot of people, they’d look like they appeared from nowhere.

You became CEO at a time of major difficulty for record labels with Napster and downloads. AI has been called an even more transformative force. Does this feel different?

It doesn’t. We keep going. The quality of the music is always a great song. There’s always a genius. My job is to make sure that we have the next genius and that we’re compelling enough for the next genius to want to be on our team so that we can create a partnership with them.

This has happened before. There were dozens of artists, famous names who didn’t understand the all-you-could-eat model in the beginning. During the absolute peak of the crisis of illegal file-sharing, they didn’t understand the work that we were doing — some of them didn’t even support it. Some artists thought that file-sharing was great because it meant that people could go to their gigs and they’d see a sea of people singing their lyrics despite not having paid for the music.

The pushback that I got on Spotify, on the all-you-can-eat model, that was just breathtaking. I was a moron. It was going to be the end of the industry, so on and so on. But here we are, more predictive, more recurring, more stable. This is another cycle of futurism. I’m very bullish about it, provided it’s compensated and that the tech platforms respect us.

Napster was about the mass theft of their music, which was bad enough. But this feels even more sensitive given that the implication that worries many creators is the outsourcing of artists.

It’s not going to replace [music]. It’ll enhance it. It could stress-test it. It’s a new format. It’s not a replacement. Every meeting I’ve had with every CEO of every tech company, companies worth trillions, the first thing that they do when I sit down with them is they say don’t worry about inauthentic products. It’s not what we see in the data. It’s not what the audience wants.

Inauthenticity doesn’t work. There was Stars on 45 and mashups in the U.K. There was Milli Vanilli. Milli Vanilli won a Grammy, got all this attention and then got discredited and didn’t replace Barbra Streisand or Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift or the Eurythmics or The Rolling Stones. Let’s get real about this.

In that regard, just a couple of days ago, Suno put out a new model trained on recordings from Warner Music Group and BMG. What’s your take on what you’ve seen?

Opt in, fair compensation, respect for what the artists do, and respect for our organization and our leadership, as well as us showing the tech platform — whether it’s YouTube or Klay or Nvidia or OpenAI or Apple or YouTube — the same respect. It’s so uncomplicated.

I’d imagine that’s what Warner or BMG would say they got out of the deal. Do you think that’s the case?

To be quite honest, I only know what my team and I think. I have no idea what everyone else thinks. All I know is what I see, and what I see is that they trained on everybody’s music and showed complete disregard. There’s no difference in my opinion. There’s potential litigation — I should probably actually shut up. I would add that I’ve made more deals than anyone in the music business. We invented this product, that negotiation. We were the first company to engage with so many companies, the first to license to what was then Facebook — it’s endless.

Speaking of deals, UMG certainly has been very active in the AI music world. But none of your partnerships has allowed for totally AI-generated music. Is that a nonstarter for you?

It’s still the same principles: respect, compensation, protection, opt-in.

Is it something you’d be OK with eventually? So far, UMG has held out.

In around 1986, I was in the studio with a huge superstar. They played me back a monitor mix, there was the most incredible guitar solo on it, I mean fabulous. I told them it was fucking brilliant. The producer gives me a smile and says, “We played that on a keyboard; it was sampled.”

You’re asking me to answer a question to which I don’t have the answer at the moment. All I know is that we have every single ingredient, and as long as there’s opt-in, as long as there’s leadership, as long as there’s support, as long as there’s respect for the artists, then I will always pay attention.

Recently, the DOJ sided with OpenAI in its fair-use argument regarding The New York Times‘ lawsuit against the company. Does that worry you?

You ask a very good question again. What do you think I think on the issue? What do you think I spend an enormous amount of my time on in terms of public policy? What do you think that I do when I go to India or Japan or the U.K. or here in Washington, D.C.? I’m not trawling bars for the next country singer, let’s put it that way.

Someone who worked closely with me many years ago had described me as a bit like a submarine. I like to turn up quietly.

A common talking point in the business over the past year and a half has been about how you’re competing with your son. He’s had success over at Atlantic. You’re both very competitive. Your labels have taken some of his company’s artists, and vice versa. What’s it like? Do you take it home with you?

With Elliot, I’m very proud of him. He’s doing a fantastic job. But he doesn’t compete with me. I run a global company. I run the biggest global company the world of music has ever seen. I’ve bought companies, bought EMI, we’ve done M&A, I’ve signed some of the biggest acts in the world. He’s been in a company that competes with other labels and other structures within my organization. He’s doing a great job.

The biggest pain in the ass about it is that when we’re together as a family, I’ve had to get one of those privacy screens for my phone — I don’t want that little fucker to see who’s calling me or anything that I’m up to. I’m sure that’s reciprocated. When we are together, I’m kicking a football around the yard with his 2½-year-old daughter. And if he’s not there, too, he’s 100 yards away at the other side of the garden because he’s taking a business call. What can I say? I hope he very successfully and brilliantly takes their market share down to zero. If anyone is going to destroy and take their market share down to zero, I’d like him to be the best person in the industry that’s ever done it like that. (Laughs.)

No, all I know is I love him, we’re extremely close and I’m proud of him.

You had a dramatic saga earlier this year with Bill Ackman and Pershing Square’s takeover bid. Obviously, that didn’t happen. Do you have anything else you’d like to say about it?

I haven’t really thought about it for several weeks. He was very supportive of the company and the direction in which we were going. I think the fact that he thinks that the company is undervalued, that he had ideas in terms of what we could be doing and thought were undervalued because of the work we were doing and our profitability and our contribution to the ecosystem, that was great to hear. I’ve been around long enough. I’m open-minded enough that if someone has strong opinions on how we could be improving, I’d like to hear it. There are things that became apparent during that period which were interesting and curious. We take that on board and we move forward. I always enjoyed his company. He’s a bright guy.

Even if he had issues with the business, it’s interesting his takeover bid backed you personally.

Shows you he’s a great judge.

This story appeared in the Oct. 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.